It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Clark Howard Show, where I'm anxious to serve

you and empower you to see make better financial decisions in your life.

Have you been frustrated with how unbelievably expensive travel has been this summer?

Well, there's one segment of the industry that was expensive earlier this year that's

now becoming a deal. I'm going to talk about it in a minute. And later, gosh, I can share

with you my IRS story. Seems like everybody has an IRS story. Things are really messed

up there right now. And if you're having issues with the IRS prior return, this year's

return, let me tell you, you're not alone. So the story is going on with the travel business.

They're really bad, ugly, with people paying huge money for any phase of it. And then

the service from the airlines has been, well, it's just just been awful. And I did a terrible

thing the other day. I was talking about the industry and an interview. And I said, gosh,

the industry is crashing and burning. And what a terrible, terrible phrase to use. And the

reporter looked at me like you didn't just say that. No, the industry is having awful

labor shortage problems and reliability problems and then the high costs. So where do you turn

if this is the end of your time of being cooped up, locked up, and you want to get out and

do things and you're looking at these prices, well, ironically enough, the cruise industry

is stock markets pounding the cruise industry because the cruise lines are starting to

see softening prices, softening demand. The people who were avid, avid, avid cruise passengers

did it. They got out there. They cruise. They paid really high prices to get back on the ships.

A lot of them were using what we're called FCC's future cruise credits. Then when the cruise

line shut down during the pandemic, instead of giving people their money back because cruise lines

were broke, they gave them FCC's which are like gift cards or vouchers for future travel. Well,

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